Which online marketing channels work best for personal injury lawyers who want more signed cases and fewer unqualified inquiries? Referrals convert at 60% to 80% and cost $50 to $200 per signed case. SEO runs $200 to $750. Google LSAs sit at $320 to $620. PPC costs $1,700 to $3,300. Facebook runs $500 to $1,200 but the real number is worse because intake burns 70 hours a month filtering junk. The channel that looks cheapest per lead is almost never the channel that’s cheapest per signed retainer, and that gap is where most PI firms lose money without realizing it. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing including PI intake operations.
So the number that gets thrown around is cost per lead and I think that’s the single most misleading metric in personal injury marketing. A firm I looked at maybe four months ago was paying $150 per lead on Facebook and they were excited about it because their Google Ads leads cost $442 each. But when I pulled their intake data and tracked which leads actually signed, the Facebook campaign was producing one retained case for every $5,000 spent because only 3% of those leads had real injuries with real liability and real insurance coverage. Their “expensive” Google leads were converting at 20% and producing signed cases at $2,210 each, which is less than half the cost when you measure the thing that actually matters.
60-80%
Referral sign rate
$200-$750
SEO cost per signed case
93%
Inquiries that never sign
$28,500/yr
Paying staff to process junk leads
The gap between cost per lead and cost per signed case is where most PI firms lose money. What follows is the signed-case economics for every major channel based on the campaigns I’ve run and the intake data I’ve tracked.
And I’m not going to pretend I have perfect data on every channel because I don’t and nobody does, but after running campaigns across enough PI firms I can tell you what the signed-case economics look like in practice. Referrals convert at 60% to 80% and the cost per signed case runs $50 to $200 before the fee split. The fee split is 25% to 33% of the recovery, which sounds expensive until you realize there’s zero upfront risk and zero junk leads clogging your intake. Organic SEO costs $200 to $750 per signed case because the marginal cost of another organic click is zero once the content ranks, and those leads convert at 14.6% versus 1.7% for outbound marketing. One extra organic case a month can produce $1.8 million in annual revenue against a fixed monthly marketing retainer. The cost per signed case varies dramatically by case type; a fender-bender and a trucking case have completely different acquisition economics, which I break down in the high-value case targeting guide.
The junk lead math: A PI firm generating 200 leads a month at a 15% qualification rate keeps 30 prospects and throws away 170. Processing those 170 rejects takes about 70 hours of staff time at $34 an hour, which is $2,380 a month or $28,500 a year paying people to say no. And that’s just the direct cost. If intake overflow causes you to miss two qualified calls a month worth $15,000 each in fees, the real loss is $360,000 a year.
Google Local Services Ads sit at $320 to $620 per signed case because you’re paying per lead instead of per click, which means the economics are cleaner. The “Google Screened” badge lifts conversion trust by about 17% and over 90% of LSA leads are phone calls rather than form fills, which means higher urgency. The catch is the category; PI firms are listed under “auto accidents” not “auto injuries” so you get calls from at-fault drivers and property-damage-only situations that you can’t always dispute for a credit. Legal directories like Avvo and Justia run $300 to $800 per signed case with conversion rates between 25% and 40%, which is strong, but the leads are shared so the first firm to answer the phone wins and speed to lead becomes everything.
Google PPC
$442 average cost per lead. Clicks run $200 to $500 in metro areas; offshore and maritime keywords hit $1,000. Conversion to signed case: 10% to 20%. Cost per signed case: $1,700 to $3,300. Click fraud eats up to 30% of budget. Requires constant negative keyword management. Produces immediate volume when managed tightly.
Facebook / Instagram
$286 to $500 cost per lead. Looks cheap on paper. But sign rate is under 5% because users are scrolling, not searching. Frictionless lead forms capture accidental clicks. Cost per signed case: $500 to $1,200 at best, $5,000 when sign rate drops to 3%. Works for retargeting warm website visitors and mass tort awareness, not cold PI prospecting.
And then there’s the emerging channel that I think most PI firms are ignoring, which is AI search. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar tools are now recommending specific firms to people asking legal questions. The data on this is early but the leads that come through AI recommendations show a 20% higher close rate than traditional Google search and 18% higher average case value. The trust transfer is different; when a person asks ChatGPT “who’s a good truck accident lawyer in Houston” and the AI names your firm, that person arrives at your website already pre-sold. Tracking it requires specific UTM parameters and most firms haven’t set that up yet, but the firms that have are seeing attribution data that makes this channel worth watching closely. I wrote about how to get your firm visible in ChatGPT search results separately.
The channel that produces the cheapest leads almost never produces the cheapest signed cases. A $150 Facebook lead that converts at 3% costs $5,000 per retainer. A $442 Google lead that converts at 20% costs $2,200. The intake data tells the real story.
And honestly the piece that connects all of this is intake, not marketing. The firms that win on signed-case economics usually aren’t spending more; they’re answering faster, screening in two minutes instead of twenty, and feeding the rejection data back into their ad platforms so the targeting gets tighter every month. The full intake speed data, CRM feedback loop architecture, and capacity planning math are in the predictable pipeline guide. The specific Google Ads and GBP tactical moves that reduce waste inside each platform are covered separately.
If it were my firm and I had a limited budget, I’d put referral development and SEO first, run LSAs for immediate phone volume, and I wouldn’t touch broad-match PPC or cold Facebook until I had the intake infrastructure to handle the junk without losing the good leads in the noise. If you’re a small firm figuring out where to start, that covers the sequencing. If you want to understand how the channels compound when run together, that’s a different page. And if any of this sounds like what’s happening in your campaigns and you want someone to pull the actual signed-case numbers by channel, send me what you’ve got and I’ll tell you where the math breaks.
